Sunday Sessions 2009/Problems Audio Players Face Today
From Google Summer of Code Mentor Wiki
This session, led by Lydia from Amarok2, covered various common features or problems music players face today and which could benefit from communautary solutions.
Contents |
[edit] Attendees
- Lydia / Amarok2 (Community Manager)
- Ulrich / SIP Communicator
- Sven / ScummVM
- Leo / KDE-Amarok2
- Florian / XMMS2
- Vincent / CrystalSpace 3D
- Michael / Audacity
- Rafael / Maemo
- Scott / Haiku
- Joel / OpenCog
- Sébastien / XMMS2
- Lance / OSUOSL
- Austin / Rockbox
- Peter / Rockbox
- & others
[edit] Problems
[edit] Lyrics
Problem: Lyrics websites are taken down regularly or filled with ads, which makes it difficult to fetch lyrics from a music player, especially without requiring frequent updates of the lyrics fetching scripts.
Proposed solution: Use a pool of services, i.e.
- Manage a central service with pointer to sites and ways to parse them (think cleanroom approach, don't store the data to avoid legal issues).
- Update that central service instead of the the local scripts.
- Possibly exploit machine Learning to optimize fetching of lyrics.
[edit] Wikipedia infos
Problem:
- Broken when change theme
- Find artist page/id?
Proposed solutions:
- Improve scripts
- Use Freebase or MusicBrainz to link entities to Wikipedia pages
[edit] Cover Art
Problem:
- Can't fetch from Amazon anymore (license, must delete after N days, broken querying, need auth now)
- Can use Last.Fm, but imperfect
Proposed solution: Use Last.Fm, try to see if it's relevant to MusicBrainz and worth getting in touch with them
[edit] Features
[edit] Portable Audio Device support
Supported wanted for:
- iPods (compatibility regularly broken)
- MTP
- USB mass-storage
- Rockbox database
Current state:
- XMMS2 (server) doesn't support any device at this point, hopes for support in clients or service clients
- Amarok2 uses libgpod (for iPods), no real native support for others
- Rockbox could benefit from syncing with a desktop music player for:
- Tracks
- Playlists
- Database (aka tagcache), faster to transfer or generate on a computer than on the device
- Ratings
- Cover art
- Rockbox used to have a script to refresh the tagcache on the desktop, talks about integrating tool in rbutils. The tagcache is documented.
- Android players could also benefit from syncing; need to look into existence of APIs for this, maybe android-flavour-specific.
Extra: People interested in find a good device with good support should consult the Rockbox Buyers' Guide
[edit] Tagging system, user tags/"labels", similar artists (Joel)
Note: by tag, think del.icio.us tags, social or personnal tagging, not file metadata (hence the "label" terminology in Amarok2 world).
- Different from "genres"
- Could be imported from Last.Fm (from the user account, or social tags)
- Useful to organise one's music or see how other people classify music
- Amarok2 has labels, not a very good interface. Potential link to Nepomuk.
- XMMS2 lets the user tag songs (in various ways), but clients don't expose any fancy interface yet.
- Need better integration for viewing, editing, browsing!
[edit] Shared central database of all hosts of music (/Joel)
- Amarok2 can be run in server mode (?)
- XMMS2 allows remote access, possibly distributed libraries with DAAP
[edit] MusicBrainz support (theefer)
- Amarok has problems with the C library, API
- XMMS2 reads the MusicBrainz tags if present, but doesn't really use them. Ideas for on-the-fly id retrieval.
- Most players expect users to apply Picard on files manually
- Tags can and should be submitted to Last.Fm (unclear what they do with them)
- No good mass tagging UI in Amarok2 yet, use easytag instead
[edit] MPRIS
What is the state of MPRIS and MPRIS support?
- Supported by Amarok2
- Not supported by XMMS2 (though they host the spec, time to get to work!)
- Good protocol for simple controls, widgets, icon tray applets
- There is a Plasma widget that talks MPRIS
- Lowest Common Denominator, so not very practical for building advanced players
